drug war and holy week
As I’m flipping through the Sunday “Parade” magazine in search of mind candy (like the endearing feature story about Jodie Foster), I was quite surprised to see numbers about our nation’s current on spending federal prisons ($6.2 billion!) in an otherwise pleasantly entertaining issue. The number is really pretty reasonable considering that 1/100 Americans are behind bars and we spend more than $40 billion annually to keep them there. Still, $6.2 billion would buy a lot of healthcare!
The numbers have become pretty mainstream these days. The Christian Century (Feb 26, 2008) points out that $2 billion is paid each year to for-profit companies to operate prisons and a whopping 1 million meals are served every day to inmates by Aramark Correctional Services! What is equally noteworthy but harder to quantify is the human toll of our incarceration rates. They guys who brought “The Wire” to HBO (Ed Burns and David Simon) have used their writing prowess to bring the human cost to life. Still, as the show wraps up the writers have hit the talk show circuit (and op-ed venues) to make a final plea. In an op-ed piece in the March 17, 2008 Time magazine, they acknowledge having ducked the “what do we do?” question as they’ve focused on bringing the Drug War to life on screen. “We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could. Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end?” They name the numbers and point out the painful reality that we have the world’s highest rate of imprisonment, a generation of law officers “no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner,” and most painfully of all, the reminder that “what the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has.”
This drama which had been the domain of storytellers and liberal pundits has gone mainstream in recent weeks. Yet it is this now mainstream concern that is at the heart of the most offending of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon clips. You-tube offers an endless replay of the soundbyte from a 2003 sermon in which Wright decries the effect of the “Drug War” on our urban core. He dances on the balls of his feet as he calls out:
“The government gives them the drugs,
builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law
and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’
No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,”
he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
Though the trajectory of Wright’s sermon is identical to that of The Wire’s Burns, Wright’s “God damn America” litany is a little more abrasive than the Burns’s shameless plea for the civil disobedience of jury nullification. Although our offense ought be the unwitting horror we’ve unleashed on our own people, we have a misguided fascination with the abrasive character of Wright’s sermon sound-byte.
Abrasive or no, the result of our “cradle to prison pipleline” (Children’s Defense Fund) is that the boys in my neighborhood are more likely to go to prison than college. I know it, and so do they. Cherubic preschoolers become confused by elementary and downright angry with the odds by adolescence. The abrasive edge to Wright’s sermon is tame compared to the raw edge of anger that I watch taking root. Our obsession with the tone of Wright’s delivery is a fool’s errand.
As we consider Jesus’ last days, he a dark skinned Jew in the Roman Empire run by the pale skinned Italians, the parallels are unmistakable and chilling. This week we will remember Jesus carted off to prison, treated to a mockery of a justice, facing the cruelty of execution for the sole crime of uppitiness, and I shudder. In his book, “Are We Rome?” Cullen Murphy is one of many contemporary authors attempting to draw our recalcitrant minds to the haunting parallels. Perhaps it is not coincidental that we prefer to blame Herod, the Jewish client-King for Jesus’ execution rather than to lie the blame at Pilate’s feet where it belongs. To acknowledge Pilate’s role in the horror is to acknowledge Rome’s, which is one step closer to acknowledging our own.
Certainly for Obama’s sake, we can hope that Jeremiah Wright would find lighter fodder for his sermons. But our odds are better with Parade magazine, and even they can’t keep quiet on this one.